Japanese Robots Play Baseball

A baseball
pitching robot that uses a hand developed by Masatoshi
Ishikawa and other researchers combined with an MIT arm can lob a
baseball at 40 Kph, hitting the strike zone 90% of the time. Ishikawa's
sensor
fusion project previously created a baseball
batting robot. The batting robot relies on a high speed vision
system developed by the same researches. If your goal is to understand
sensor fusion in robots, what could be
more natural that putting these two robots in the same room and having
them play ball? Since the slow pitching speed makes things too easy on
the batting robot, the researchers are working on improvements to the
pitcher that will allow it to achieve ball speeds of 150 Kph. They also
hope to improve the accuracy of the robot batter so that it can hit
balls towards selected targets. Besides improvements in robot sensor
fusion, this research will also lead to improvements in visual collision
avoidance and realtime
3D shape recognition. Via PinkTentacle.com,
via Mainichi